Said I Was Done With Call of Duty, Then I Played The MW4 Beta...

By: Knux456 | August 30th, 2026 | Sunday 4:56am EST

Not “I’m done until the next trailer drops.” Not “I’m done, but I’ll probably be online opening night anyway.” I mean done with Call of Duty.

I had reached that point with the franchise where every new game started feeling like I was paying $70 to find out which new thing was going to annoy me this year. The movement, the weird mechanics, the lobbies constantly breaking up. The franchise slowly moving further away from the Call of Duty I remembered loving in the first place. Eventually, I stopped being mad about it, I just stopped caring.

For real, that's probably worse when you think about it. Then I downloaded the Modern Warfare 4 beta this weekend. Yeah ya'll, we need to talk about this one...

Damn, This Feels Good to be Back..

I'm not about to sit here and give you some deep technical breakdown after just a handful of matches. I'm on here trying to learn all of these dope new mechanics to the thing. I only played Team Deathmatch so far. There are seven new modes sitting there that I haven't even touched yet, so I've still got plenty to see before this beta ends on Sept 1st. I know what a Call of Duty game feels like when it's fighting against me. I know what it feels like when I finish a match and immediately want to play again.

MW4 gave me that feeling again. The movement feels right this time around. Not perfect because I'm sure somebody somewhere has already discovered some ridiculous slide-cancel-spin-jump technique that'll have me questioning my age by the time this drops in October. Finally it feels responsive. Heavy enough to feel grounded without feeling sluggish.

The guns though, Maaaannn. This is one of those things that's hard to explain until the controller is actually in your hands.

There's something about the combination of the gunplay and the haptic feedback that makes pulling the trigger feel satisfying for real. The weapons have some weight to them. Shooting somebody doesn't feel like you're pointing a laser pointer across the map and waiting for numbers to appear, there's true feedback to this one. There's impact, that little something that makes you want to get into another gunfight right away. You want to keep leveling up and it feels fun again. Considering how I felt about the last couple of Modern Warfare games? That's a pretty big compliment.

Wait... Y'all Kept the Lobby Together Too?

Then something happened that probably shouldn't have impressed me as much as it did, but the lobby stayed together, and it surprised all of us during the run 😂.. Do you understand how ridiculous it is that something this simple made me and a bunch of strangers happy? Match ended, and you don't get thrown back into the Call of Duty matchmaking abyss, loosing touch with new friends in the fire squad. You can stay with the same group now like back in the day, run another match. Maybe you realize the random dude who went 23-8 actually knows what he's doing. Stay on the same squad for a while.

Maybe you actually... make friends playing Call of Duty again. Remember them days? Apparently Call of Duty finally does. That was such a huge part of multiplayer gaming back when this franchise cared about us.

You didn't need Discord communities and Looking For Group posts. Sometimes you just happened to land in a lobby with somebody, played five games together, started talking trash in the lobby while you worded on your load out, added each other to the friend list, and suddenly you had somebody you'd be gaming with for the next three years.

Call of Duty somehow forgot how important that was for us, that's probably the biggest thing I took away from this beta so far. We don't need Call of Duty to reinvent what was already working. We just wanted them to stop messing with the stuff that was already fire.

Fix the movement, the lag, the cheating (although, we won't know about how that feels until the game actually drops..) Just make the guns feel real by taking advantage of the controllers capabilities for real. Give us some solid maps. Let multiplayer feel like a cool social sandbox again. Stop trying to solve problems nobody asked for 😂

It feels like somebody finally sat down and actually listened to the people who've been yelling about this stuff for years. That part is what has me locked in. Not whatever celebrity they eventually put in Warzone.

Now Look What Y'all Did To Us 👀

Yo for real, I'm already thinking about buying the damn game, the Vault Edition. Not talking digital either. I want the physical copy. Give me that steel case collectible while you're at it. Matter of fact, since we're bringing them old Call of Duty feelings back... Bring back the midnight release too. I want the posters. I want people standing outside the store talking about which gun they're running with. I want somebody's mother sitting in the parking lot wondering why her grown ass son needed a video game at 12:01 in the morning. Bring all that back. 😂 That's part of what Call of Duty used to be. A new COD dropping in the fall used to feel like a whole event. After playing this beta, I'm starting to feel a little bit of that again. That's the part I wasn't expecting to be honest.

So, Knux456 Has Reenlisted

I'm still not giving MW4 a blank check, it's still just a beta. I've only scratched the surface.

I've got seven new modes to try, more weapons to mess with, more maps to learn and plenty of time for Call of Duty to remind me why I left in the first place. 😂 Right now though? I'm tapped in. If you walked away from Call of Duty like I did, I wouldn't tell you to blindly preorder this one. I would tell you this: Knock the dust off.

Download the beta while it's free. Strap those virtual boots back on. See what you think for yourself. For the first time in a while, Call of Duty doesn't feel like it's trying to convince me that it's back, It feels like it's showing me, that's all I needed. Knux456 has officially come out of retirement ya'll I'm out to smoke them boots! 🎮

The Gamerhood